Google makes Dart for web programmers

Summary:Google has begun to give details of Dart, a new language that the company says is intended for structured web coding.The designers of the language say that their aims were to make a familiar, natural language for web programming that has high performance, is flexible yet encourages structure.

Google has begun to give details of Dart, a new language that the company says is intended for structured web coding.

The designers of the language say that their aims were to make a familiar, natural language for web programming that has high performance, is flexible yet encourages structure. Talking at the Goto conference in Denmark on Monday, project leader Lars Bak said that "If we want to focus on making the Web better over time, we have to innovate," also saying on a related blog post that "We look forward to rapidly evolving Dart into a solid platform for structured web programming."

Recognisable to anyone who has experience of C-type procedural languages, Dart includes support for concurrent programming, a DOM library for working with HTML5 documents, and various Web-centred data types.

Dart can run either in a native virtual machine, much like Java, or via a compiler that translates Dart code to Javascript. This latter option means Dart will run in any modern browser, but native VM execution is likely to be much faster. Google says it hasn't integrated the Dart VM into Chrome but that it plans to explore the option.

The first news of Dart surfaced in September in an announcement followed by a leaked memo, which revealed that the language would be developed extensively in-house and then offered as an open standard. The ultimate aim, the memo stated, was to "replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform".

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